Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Slaughter blinked and before him stretched an endless bone field where the skeletal remains of men, women, and children were intermixed with the bones of animals and rubble and refuse as if an immense graveyard had vomited up its dead and a city had been shattered to dust and fragments. Yes, an ossuary. An urban graveyard. He saw a few blackened buildings standing in the distance but everything else was rubble and bones and a blowing dust of desertion and a choking charnel smoke boiling into the sky.

Through the haze there was a face above that nightmare cityscape, a face that was the sun but darkest orange giving over to blood-red. A grinning skull-face which was the face of Black Hat the Skeleton Man smirking with satisfaction over the heaped and bird-picked death far below, happy, happy, happy was he. The face faded into the haze but the grin, like that of the storied cat, remained toothsome and smiling.

“That is the ending, favored son,” said Black Hat who was only a grin of teeth himself now. “It’s up to you to fill in the rest.”

When Slaughter again came out of it, he was sitting on the bench. He was breathing, damp with sweat, knowing he had been shown something and knowing that it would never make complete sense to him. Was that post-apocalyptic glimpse he’d been given something he needed to stop from happening or would it happen regardless? And why was it all channeled through his guilt of Dirty Mary, his childhood love—and fear—of a certain children’s book, and his tenure as a member of the dreaded 158 Crew?

The trip was slowing now, coming down to earth, yet the buzz was still owning him, just beginning to release its grip. There was a cigarette in his hand and he smoked it and tried to think, but his head was like a colander and his thoughts were liquid that spilled through the holes. All that remained was gunk and shit, like the stuff caught in a lint trap—guilt, self-doubt, self-recrimination, self-loathing, despair, and melancholy. All the very things that were snares that would trip him up, baggage that would slow him down, shovels that would dig his grave.

He blinked, and somehow the cigarette had burned between his fingers or maybe he had smoked it. As he came down he began to feel how sore his body was, his joints stiff and aching, and he wondered, truly, why he had done it in the first place. Did he really expect revelation from a drug? All he had, in the end, were more questions and half-thoughts, muddled suspicions, and vague apprehensions.

He sighed and stood up.

Time was not disjointed now, it was slow and smooth and orderly. The buzz was fading to a mild exhilaration. Despite the soreness, he felt good, he felt solid and real and grounded. His eyes only saw this world.

And as they saw it, they also saw the occupants of this world: the living dead. For all around him were zombies, twenty or thirty of them at least.

Chapter Twenty-One

How long they had been watching him, he did not know.